Jesus for Farmers and Fishers: Justice for All Those Marginalized by Our Food System

By Gary Paul Nabhan

Climate disasters, tariff wars, extractive technologies, and deepening debts are plummeting American food producers into what is quickly becoming the most severe farm crisis of the last half-century. Yet we are largely unaware of the plight of those whose hands and hearts toil to sustain us.

Agrarian and ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan--the "father of the local food movement"--offers a fresh, imaginative look at the parables of Jesus to bring us into a heart of compassion for those in the food economy hit by this unprecedented crisis. Offering palpable scenes from the Sea of Galilee and the fields, orchards, and feasting tables that surrounded it, Nabhan contrasts the profound ways Jesus interacted with those who were the workers of the field and the fishers of the sea with the events currently occurring in American farm country and fishing harbors.

Tapping the work of Middle Eastern naturalists, environmental historians, archaeologists, and agro-ecologists, Jesus for Farmers and Fishers is sure to catalyze deeper conversations, moral appraisals, and faith-based social actions in each of our faith-land-water communities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Release date: Mar 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781506465074

Gary Paul Nabhan

Gary Paul Nabhan is an Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, MacArthur "genius" award winner, and ethnobotanist of Arab-American descent. His food and farming books include Food from the Radical Center, Where Our Food Comes From, and the forthcoming Jesus for Farmers and Fishers.

Book preview

Jesus for Farmers and Fishers

. . . and Farmworkers, Food Service Workers, Ranchers, Lobster Catchers, Sheepherders, Cowboys, Foragers, Orchard Keepers, Pruners, Shearers, Vintners, Brewers, Bakers, Dairy Workers, Cheese Makers, Malters, Manure Spreaders, Mushroom Hunters, Composters, Seeders, Breeders, Irrigators, Clam Diggers, Truckers, Millers, Vets, Market Vendors, Field Gleaners, Soup Kitchen Ladlers, Food Bank Staffers, Landfill Scavengers . . .

Praise for Gary Paul Nabhan

Nabhan’s holistic look [at our food system] extends to his own life, in which daily work and daily spiritual practice provide balance.

—Utne Reader World Visionary Award

Lyricism . . . infuses [Nabhan’s] prose, a rhapsody tempered by hard botanical science.

—San Francisco Chronicle

Nabhan’s painstaking research has not eclipsed an evident natural knack for storytelling.

—Saveur

Nabhan teaches ecological lessons to nonscientists through an impressive range of disciplines: ancient history, ethnobiology, paleo-nutrition, ecology, history, anthropology, and more.

—Choice Reviews

Praise for Jesus for Farmers and Fishers

A bold, courageous, and utterly original rereading of Jesus’s parables that draws us deep into questions of what it means to stand with those struggling with food insecurity, erosion of cultural identity, and spiritual loss. This gifted ethnobotanist, with his eyes wide open, helps us feel anew the pathos and power of Jesus’s teachings about food and life and reimagine the world as sacramental.

—Douglas E. Christie, PhD, author of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind

Every page of this fascinating book imbues the Scriptures with smell and taste, a living landscape and rich cultural tradition. Nabhan’s gift for telling true stories and his keen insight into the practices of extractive economies then and now open our eyes to the gospel imperative of food justice.

—Ellen F. Davis, Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology, Duke Divinity School

"Who better to give us a fresh reading of the Jesus story than one of our leading agrarian writers and practitioners? In Jesus for Farmers and Fishers, Gary Paul Nabhan’s vast scientific and agricultural acumen melds with a deep contemplative wisdom. The result is one of the most insightful readings of the Gospels I’ve encountered, read through the eyes of the very people Jesus served: fishers, farmers, bakers, gleaners, migrant farmworkers. Here is a book for today’s food justice movement, and for anyone who hungers for restoration of our lands and our communities."

—Fred Bahnson, author of Soil and Sacrament, and founder of the Food, Health, and Ecological Well-Being Program at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity

I am hungry for this book. Gary Paul Nabhan calls us to discover the tastes, scents, and textures of food in the Gospels and encounter the people who grew it, caught it, and cooked it. Nabhan’s work plunges us into the way of Jesus that turns things upside down and inside out. The powerful are brought low and the lowly raised up. As Nabhan digs into the complexity and depth of injustice in Gospel times, we’re shown stories that interweave with those of field hands and food service workers who provide our food—at great cost to themselves.

—Anna Woofenden, author of This Is God’s Table: Finding Church Beyond the Walls

"Prepare to be illuminated! Jesus for Farmers and Fishers brims with insights that can only come when you join in one person the world’s leading ethnobotanist, a major food justice advocate, and a member of the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans. Page after page, Gary Paul Nabhan shows how living closely and practically with land, water, and fellow creatures helps readers appreciate Scripture in ways they never have before."

—Norman Wirzba, Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Theology, Duke University, and author of Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating

Jesus for Farmers and Fishers

Justice for All Those Marginalized by Our Food System

By Gary Paul Nabhan, known as Franciscan Brother Coyote

Broadleaf Books

MINNEAPOLIS

JESUS FOR FARMERS AND FISHERS

Justice for All Those Marginalized by Our Food System

Copyright © 2021 Gary Paul Nabhan. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [e-mail] or write to Permissions, Broadleaf Books, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Cover image: shtonado/istock

Cover design: James Kegley

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-6506-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-6507-4

Contents

Introduction

Problems and Parables

1. What Was Happening Then Is Happening Now

2. The Sower

Fish Stories

3. Seven Springs

4. Sustaining Abundance

5. Changing the Way We Fish

6. Hidden Treasures

Farm Stories

7. It Is High Noon in the Desert

8. Farmsteads, Households, and Collaboration

9. Farmworkers

Into the Wild

10. The Wonders of Weeds

11. The Wild Edges

Food Justice

12. Herders

13. Women Farmers

14. Gleaners

15. Profiteers

Last Suppers

16. Barren Figs

17. Communion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Further Readings on Parables

About the Author

This book is dedicated to all farmers, fishers, and Franciscans.

The kin-dom of heaven

is like this: a treasure hidden

within a field of golden grain,

which some folks accidentally stumbled upon

and then covered up with soil and brush

to keep safe deep in the ground

where it had been originally found.

In their joy, the discoverers

go out and sell everything

they have ever possessed

so that they may protect

and prosper in that treasured place.

Introduction

It is time for you to taste and see. It is time to smell and listen.

Open your taste buds and eyes as well as your nostrils and ears. As you do so, try to imagine Jesus as a child, one who is beginning to explore this world. Picture him as he comes into his first sensory contact with the delicious bounty of the Holy Lands and the Sacred Seas:

The mildly sweet flavor and semifirm, flaky texture of Saint Peter’s fish. It is a tilapia special to the Sea of Galilee.

Nutty, whole-grain flatbreads baked on hot stones or in small wood-fired ovens. The dough for breads came from ancient grains such as barley, einkorn, and emmer wheat. After baking on both sides atop hot stones, the flatbreads were eaten while still warm, still carrying the fragrance of olive branches lingering in the wood smoke.

The pale-green figs of the Mediterranean basin—sweet and delicate in texture and yet so capable of enduring the harsh environments of the desert as they rooted themselves in the slightest crevices of barren cliff faces.

The oil-rich olives, sharply bitter in their flavor until salt, water, and time soften and sweeten them.

The pomegranate, with its tough, leathery skin on the outside. Crack it open and you discover its treasure trove of carmine-colored arils hidden inside. Their moisture-rich packets of sweet juice and crunchy kernels are like a dream to the pilgrim’s tongue, which is parched and fissured.

When we taste and see, smell and listen, as the young Jesus did, our senses assure us that the earth that the Lord gifted us is a good place in which to dwell.

Our Creator gave his only begotten Son to this precious world. To be incarnate in it. To be with us here. Who can doubt that Jesus of Nazareth took pleasure in these flavors, fragrances, textures, and colors? He may have been poor, but he was no puritan who disavowed his senses.

He offered every passerby a place at the table, regardless of their race, faith, social status, or political stance. Together with his nearest neighbors and wayfaring strangers, Jesus celebrated the sensory abundance of the creation with a fervor and elation usually reserved for families joined at a wedding feast. As though Jesus had to remind us what a delicious, sensuous world we enjoy!

---

But just what kind of place and time was Jesus himself born into?

For starters, the rural landscapes and seascapes of semiarid Galilee were peopled places more than pristine wildernesses. They were cultured as much as a bowl of yogurt is cultured, as much as grapes are fermented in large clay pots.

Trammel nets, or fish traps, were set out in waters where a freshwater spring wells up into the salty sea. And patient orchard keepers might fertilize a seemingly barren fig tree with donkey manure just to see if they could coax it into fruiting once more.

To be sure, the people of the rural villages in Galilee were not just about catching fish, baking bread, and fermenting wine. They also had to deal with the trinity of poverty, pain, and oppression. In Jesus’s day, job-seeking farmworkers might stand for hours with their sickles or scythes in hand, waiting in the shade of a carob tree on the edge of the village for some foreman to hire them. A crooked manager of hired harvesters might arrive, hoping to cheat both his boss and the workers by undervaluing their work. An aristocrat might have demanded the payment of a docking fee from all the fishers who hauled their catch ashore at his landing area. By such political maneuvers, he might succeed in closing down every other dock to further enrich himself, exploiting the rural families who had freely used the harbor for generations. Meanwhile, a local vintner might cut corners after suffering from a poor harvest of grapes by paying off creditors with diluted wine and pouring the mixture into old, fragile wineskins.

To put it simply, some things have not changed much since Jesus’s day two thousand years ago. But keep in mind that the struggles in Galilee were precursors to what has since happened in so many other communities of rural African, Asian, Latino, and indigenous farmers and fishers as a result of globalization. Why was Galilee on the front lines at that time? Because its fertile lands, long growing seasons, and bounteous waters made it one of the most productive breadbaskets between the Tigris-Euphrates river system and the delta of the Nile. And yet their products were much more accessible to Rome and Athens by horse cart or ship than those from Egypt or Mesopotamia. It was only during the time of Jesus that Galilee became a flash point for agrarian conflicts that would later reverberate across the Roman Empire.

Galilee was not some bucolic countryside where peasants pursued a romantic agrarian ideal. It was rife with difficult conflicts and gritty problems: upheavals in landownership and use, inequities in food access and production, and the usurpation of resources by rich absentee owners and commodity brokers. Galilee was a crossroads where Jews, Romans, Greeks, Nabateans, Phoenicians, Samaritans, and Syrians lived in tension with one another. Many of those tensions flared when